Guitar Pro 4

In one word: Phenomenal!

I’ve been working with version 3 for over a year now and couldn’t see how they could make it really better, with the exception of an undo feature. This version surpasses any of my expectations. First, undo has been added. This, in the long run saves a lot of time. The only thing is that it is not explicit under the menus; you access it by the usual method of Ctrl-Z.

Other than that, the new features in this version are:

-Standard notation: if you wish, you can have a second bar, below your tab one which writes your score in standard notation. This is great if you want to give a track to someone who can read music or if you want to teach yourself standard notation. If you don’t need it or want it, you don’t have to live with it as it will come and go at the press of a button.

-Fretboard: this shows you a guitar neck with red dots where your fingers should be. These can also, if you so desire, give you the names of the notes. Which also means that you write a chord simply by clicking on the frets where your fingers are.

-Keyboard: if you’re writing from a keyboard, it’s often a pain to figure out how to translate your notes to a guitar. Open the keyboard layout and click the keys where your fingers are and it will convert it to guitar for you.

-Scales: what notes are in C Pentatonic Major Scale? Ask and it will show you. Great for learning scales and using them to help you compose.

-Drum notations: this tool enhances your drum and percussion writing as it allows you to use standard drum notation to write your drum tracks.

-Digital guitar tuner: your guitar is plugged into your computer and you need to tune it? Don’t unplug it and replug it into your tuner then back into the computer. Just open the digital tuner and tune it from there.

-Wave exports: finally! With version 3, if I needed a drum track for a demo, I couldn’t just use a MIDI track as these don’t mix into standard recordings. You have to convert the track to a WAV first. So I used to open Soundforge, click record, then play the track through GuitarPro. Much more complicated than it sounds. This way, you can record it into WAV simply by using the export feature and playing it through GuitarPro.

-Advanced tremolo bar: this one’s really great. When you want to add a tremolo bar effect to a track, you can now do it in a very realistic manner directly in GuitarPro. Adds a lot of value when you need it.

-Cut/Copy/Paste between two sessions of GuitarPro. This used to be a pain with version 3. If you had two separate scores which you wanted to try together, you would have to open one, copy the track you needed, then open the other score and paste the track. Then go back to the first and copy another track, then open the second… Now you can just open a second GuitarPro session and copy and paste from it.

-Auto backups and restore: refines your vocabulary. Sometimes your scores get so huge that your computer can’t take it and quits on you. Of course, you forgot to save your last half hour of work. The time it took to reboot the computer reopen the file and make all those changes again tended to make one curse quite a lot. Now, if this happens, when you reopen GuitarPro, it tells you it has an unsaved score and would you like to open it? Voilà! The score as it was with all your changes. Another practicality of it is if you accidentally delete a file, there is always a backup. Great for the lower back as it saves you from all those kicks you’ve been giving yourself…

-Lyrics: now, instead of writing your lyrics note by note, you can simply write them in all at once and they’ll find their own place (more-or-less).

-User’s tuning: if you use your own strange tunings, you can incorporate these.

-Multi-track printing: before, if you wanted to print a score which had twelve tracks, you had to send each track to your printer one by one. Now you can print the whole thing with one command.

-More flexible chord diagrams: now you can use the chord diagrams for up to 7 strings.

-Customizable buttons and menus: don’t use a feature? Get rid of it. Place buttons where you’re comfortable.

And there’s even more than all this. It has been made better for both the beginner guitarist and the professional. It’s so much more than could have been expected and I’m extremely excited about it and all the new possibilities it has opened up.

You can download a free demo version of it, but beware that the demo, although all features work, is too limited as you can only use 24 bars. It doesn’t begin to show you all you can do with it.

The only slight problem I’ve found with it is that it takes huge amounts of memory. Considering that I’m working with a Celeron 366 and 64 Mb of RAM, it occasionally causes problems. But a bit more RAM and a faster processor would fix this easily enough. I would like to stress that these are limitations due to my computer and not to the software itself.

The folks at Arobas informatique have done an incredible job with this software. It’s cheap to buy, considering what you get and if you’re upgrading, they have discount prices for you. I cannot recomend this software enough. It’s amazing and every guitarist and every songwriter should have it.